{"id":616,"date":"2008-12-18T10:13:57","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T16:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mindaverse.com\/?p=616"},"modified":"2008-12-18T10:13:57","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T16:13:57","slug":"save-time-with-timesvr-virtual-assistants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/?p=616","title":{"rendered":"Save time with TimeSvr virtual assistants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always been a big advocate of outsourcing through the use of virtual assistants. In fact, I wrote about <a href=\"http:\/\/mindaverse.com\/2008\/03\/14\/do-you-need-a-personal-assistant\/\">personal assistants<\/a> back in March and had started using a service called GetFriday. I had some mixed experiences (like sending a birthday greeting when it <a href=\"http:\/\/mindaverse.com\/2008\/06\/15\/dreams-daily-dosage-3\/\">wasn&#8217;t someone&#8217;s birthday<\/a>) and decided the cost was no longer justified.<\/p>\n<h2><a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesvr.com\/?affiliate=devinreams\">TimeSvr<\/a> exceeds my expectations<\/h2>\n<p>Out of the blue, as I was thinking I needed to drop my assistant, I received an e-mail from the CEO of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesvr.com\/?affiliate=devinreams\">TimeSvr<\/a>. He and I exchanged e-mails a bit. Let me pause and note: I was getting e-mail responses from the CEO faster than my assistant at GetFriday. I decided I needed to give TimeSvr a test run and I&#8217;m so glad I did.<\/p>\n<p>Now this post isn&#8217;t meant to put down any other services (including the one popularized by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fourhourworkweek.com\/\">Tim Ferriss<\/a>), it&#8217;s to demonstrate how my expectations were far exceeded within my first day of use:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Web-based task tracking:<\/strong> with other services, you send an e-mail to your assistant and wait for a confirmation. TimeSvr provides you with a dashboard that shows all your tasks with and responses, updates, etc.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Timeliness of responses:<\/strong> the service has remained small to provide for better quality. Many of the other virtual assistant services have grown far larger than they could handle. I&#8217;ve found TimeSvr will get back to me in as little as an hour as opposed to a day.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Excellent English skills:<\/strong> it was very obvious to me that the assistants excel at the language. Some of my more enjoyable e-mails had been from previous assistants in broken English. I can actually talk to my assistant on the phone now, I couldn&#8217;t easily do that before.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Effectiveness exceeds expectations:<\/strong> every time I get a response from an assigned task I always think &#8220;wow, s\/he&#8217;s good!&#8221;. I had to find a replacement kitchen accessory: my assistant placed calls to numerous retailers to find the part, the manufacturer, provided me with the warranty details, etc. I was floored with the level of detail I was handed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I love assigning a task and getting a call back in an hour or two with my assistant and a customer service representative on the line. &#8220;Hello Devin, this is ______, I have ______ on the line with me and they&#8217;d like to confirm _________. Okay, thank you, Devin.&#8221; Wow. I didn&#8217;t even realize you could get someone on the phone from __________.<\/p>\n<p>The best part of TimeSvr is the fact they probably don&#8217;t put themselves in the same category of services that I&#8217;ve used in the past (which were touted as the best, at the time):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We really don&#8217;t compare ourselves to anyone. We just saw a market underserved and decided to fill the void.  -Zaki Mahomed, CEO<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h2>TimeSvr features<\/h2>\n<p>This is a company that &#8220;gets it&#8221;. They understand the web worker like myself, especially. You have various mediums to submit a task, no matter where you are or what you&#8217;re doing.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/devdev\/3117706069\/\" title=\"TimeSvr dashboard by devinreams, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3203\/3117706069_0a6142205d.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"118\" alt=\"TimeSvr dashboard\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>E-mail:<\/strong> Sending tasks to the tasks e-mail will automatically get routed and assigned immediately. You can see these tasks appear in your dashboard.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Skype<\/strong>: Chat with the Skype account to submit a task. If you&#8217;re on instant messenger all day, why not?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Phone<\/strong>: If you&#8217;re on the road and need to cancel an appointment just pick up the phone and let them know.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And here&#8217;s one of the best features, if you&#8217;re a trusting person: complete your profile. Simply fill out your contact details, calendar credentials, authorized credit card number, shipping address, travel preferences, etc. Once you&#8217;ve provided all your details, the possibilities for easily assigning tasks open up.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t want to provide everything up front, then simply include it in the task. I&#8217;ve had insurance payments made, online subscriptions canceled. I even &#8220;lost&#8221; a gift certificate applied to my Amazon account. Within minutes my assistant found which item the certificate was applied to. I thought it had just expired&#8230; oops.<\/p>\n<h2>Try it for yourself<\/h2>\n<p>TimeSvr is far more affordable than any comparable service I&#8217;ve found out there. At $69 per month you receive unlimited basic tasks (book a flight, cancel this appointment) and up to 8 hours of extended (or complex) task time. The team is available 24\/7 including holidays which exceeds most other service I&#8217;ve looked into.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t recommend these guys enough. Go ahead and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesvr.com\/?affiliate=devinreams\">sign up today<\/a>. You can try them out for three days, free.<\/p>\n<h2>My assistant wrote this post<\/h2>\n<p>Just joking. But I did ask them (in the form of a task) what <em>they<\/em> thought were the three best things about the service. They were &#8220;saving precious time&#8221;, &#8220;really cost effective solutions&#8221;, and &#8220;privacy control&#8221; (with explanations for each). I was impressed and agree. Sorry to disappoint but I really haven&#8217;t found anything negative to say about this group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always been a big advocate of outsourcing through the use of virtual assistants. In fact, I wrote about personal assistants back in March and had started using a service called GetFriday. I had some mixed experiences (like sending a birthday greeting when it wasn&#8217;t someone&#8217;s birthday) and decided the cost was no longer justified. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifehack"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}